Tuesday, 31 May 2016

Last summer we've had the possibility to survey along the first Italian front-line of WW1 on the ridge between the the two strategically important summits of Mt. Quaternà (2.503m) an Col Rosson (2.305m).
(Commissioned by the Algudnei-Mueseum in Dosoledo)
They are situated in the north of the Italian region of Veneto, near to the Austrian and Tyrolean border.

The project area. Pay attention to the trenches in the middleground.

It took several weeks to document an unexpected amount of military remains built between May 1915 and November 1917.

Trenches at the foot of Col Rosson

The central part of our approach was an intensive and very accurate DGPS-survey of every visible structure on the surface, attended by sfm-documentation of objects of special interest. Also underground structures, first of all caverns of different typology, were recorded with 3d-pointclouds.

Commemorative inscription of a machine-gun detachment.

Furthermore we've made several thousands of pictures with recorded position of the photographer and viewing direction.

Overview of the survey results

At this moment we've competed the postprocessing of the approx. 80.000 GPS points, prising out 4.194 features with an individual ID number and a description in English, Italian and German language.

High density of remains around of Mt. Rosson.

The next step will be the archaeological interpretation of the results, incorporating documents and maps of different military archives.

First and second Italian line.

The fieldwork was crucially supported by our colleagues Michele Mazzurana and Gianluca Fondriest.
The whole project would not have been possible without the direction of Daniela Zambelli and the confidence of Algudnei's director Arrigo De Martin Mattiò.All images in this article are free, following the terms of CC-BY-4.0 Creator: Arc-Team Archaeology

Sometimes we are asked why (after 11 years) we still keep OpenJUMP in ArcheOS, since QGIS became such a functional GIS and could cover all the feature of the other similar software. The main reason for such a choice are two:

2. the software (Polygontool) our friend +Szabolcs Köllö (aka Keulemaster) developed for us, in order to handle big data in archaeological surveys, is strictly connected with OpenJUMP

The GIS OpenJUMP

Today I just finished to package for (ArcheOS Hypatia) the last version of this GIS (OpenJUMP 1.9.1) and to upload it in our experimental repository (soon we share it), so I prepared a new videotutorial to illustrate one of the operation in which OpenJUMP is still useful, since the similar tool of QGIS are sometimes buggy: the recovering of old excavation data from a local (cartesian) coordinate system to a projected coordinate system (e.g. in the videotutorial, ETRS89 / UTM zone 32 N).

Friday, 27 May 2016

In these days we are working very hard to package new software for ArcheOS v. 6 (codename Hypatia). This time we just finished to work on the new GUI +Martin Greca developed for +Pierre Moulon software, openMVG, setting up all the requested dependencies. The result is a new tool for 3D photogrammetry in +ArcheOS: openMVG-GUI. This software can be considered as the evolution of the old Python Photogrammetry ToolBox, but we are currently working to fix some bugs of this application to keep providing it in ArcheOS, since it gave the best results in underground environment documentation.

Here below you an see a fast videotutorial I did for our brand new YouTube channel:

To speed up ArcheOS Hypatia development, we set up an unofficial new repository, which we will use (by now) just internally our society, to be sure that everything works fine before to release it publicly to all the users. Anyway we will share this repository also during the university courses in which we should teach this years, like the one in Evora (Portugal) or the one in Venice, since in this conditions it is possible to work under strict control, avoiding problems in unresolved package dependencies. As soon as the new repository will be hardly tested, we will open it, adding the coordinates to the ArcheOS main branch.

Wednesday, 4 May 2016

Since ArcheOS 4 we added to the distro the open source software Total Open Station (in order to handle the process of downloading and converting raw data from our instruments) and I have to say that I still use the tool very often to turn Trimble .are file into .csv format, even if sometimes I experienced difficulties in connecting the hardware to my PC. For this reason I tried some alternatives and today I want to write about one of these software.
Its name is ComEasy and it is developed by Dr. Zoltàn Siki (aka zsiki) of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE). To test the software I simply downloaded the source code from the repository, but I had to modify the file "maincom_easy.tcl" in order to make it work under a Debian derived distribution like ArcheOS 6 Hypathia (as you see in the image below).

The small modification of the source code

Once I changed the Tcl interpreter (from Prowish to Wish), the software worked perfectly and I tested it with a Spectra Precision Focus 10 instrument. Until now I never experienced connection problems, so I recorded I short videotutorial to illustrate how the software work and I plan to add it to ArcheOS Hypatia suite to work with total stations, (together with Total Open Station, of course).
Here below is the short videotutorial I did.